After a stressful weekend, it was wonderful to be with four year olds; their simple outlook on life is so refreshing. Our focus for today was the book "The Mitten" by Jan Brett. Vocabulary words were moles burrow, hedgehog snuffles, owl swoops, bear lumbers, and mouse wriggles. These are the words in the song so we created actions to help with memory. Burrow was something like a dog paddle, snuffles we twitched our noses, swoops our hand swooped in front of us, lumbers we moved our shoulders slowly like our shoulders were trying to walk, and wriggles we mad our bodies squirm.
I downloaded her free song sheet and then added the pictures from Jan Brett's website http://www.janbrett.com/mitten_masks_main.htm. I chose to use the mitten masks pictures so that the pictures would be consistent through out the lesson. We also talked about how important the mittens are in pairs. Pair is another one of our new vocabulary words.
Next we worked on 'estimation' or as the firstgradewow.blogspot.com. The students had to estimate how many items could be put in the area, the perimeter, along a vertical line, and finally on a horizontal line. To help identify the different ways to measure the mitten, I left the area mitten blank, I highlighted the perimeter of the mitten, and drew straight lines with the highlighter across the mitten for the horizontal measurement, and a highlighted line from the cuff to the tip of the mitten for the vertical measurement. Then we used Honeycomb cereal to measure each item to see if our estimation was correct, close, or way off. They are still learning what estimation is all about and so we had a couple of close guesses and some that were way out there. One student thought that measuring horizontally across the mitten would take 1,000 pieces of cereal. We talked about how many were in the area of the mitten, which was about 25, and if a single line would need more or less pieces of cereal and she was sure that it would need less cereal but still thought that 1,000 was a good estimation anyway. So we went with that answer, the student was surprised that it only took 6 pieces of cereal to cover the horizontal line.
All of our estimations and results were recorded in our new science / math journals. Science opens on one side and you flip it over and the math journal is on the other side. The students were so in love with their new journals they hugged them as they put them away.
While I worked one on one with a student on the estimation activity, my other student worked on making sentences. Using the letter books, from thisreadingmama.com that I have mentioned before, she made sentences with word strips and read the sentences created. We are focusing on our sight words a, the, see, and I.
All this hard work made the students hungry. We created mitten pairs for our snack, which ended up being a part of lunch instead. Using seamless croissant dough and a hand/mitten cookie cutter, we cut out 2 mitten shapes and then painted them with food coloring. We only used 4 colors (that is all I had) and that was plenty of choices. Since the cutter only made a right hand and we wanted to have a pair of mittens; we cut out 2 and flipped one over to make the left mitten. Paint brushes accidentally ran into other peoples' hands we reached for more paint and so our hands had interesting markings too. A fun bonus to the activity. Next time I might dilute the food coloring with a little bit of water to minimize the colors on the hands. Although the paint looked really bold and beautiful on the mittens.
While the mittens were baking we had a snack. We had a pair of apple wedges, a pair of carrot sticks, a pair of cheese sticks (actually it was one cheese stick broken in half), yogurt, and apple juice.
As an added treat for working so hard, I told the Three Little Kittens nursery rhyme as a clue for our special treat. They didn't really catch on until I replaced 3 kittens with 2 students retold it:
"Two little students cut out their mittens
And they began to cry,
Oh, teacher dear, we sadly fear,
Our mittens we have cut.
What! cut out your mittens, you ambitious students!
Then you shall have some pie.
Two little students did bake their mittens
And they began to cry,
Oh teacher, dear see here see here
Our mittens we have baked.
What! You clever little students, you baked your mittens,
Then you shall have some pie."
I had made small little cherry pies for them as a special treat. The rhyme wasn't exactly perfect but the girls thought it was funny and a better clue than the Three Little Kittens rhyme.
Ta Da! The finished product. Everyone was button popping proud of their creation. Sadly. we had to let the mittens cool; so took our finished product home to eat with lunch.
After all this kitchen fun we only had about 15 minutes before school was over so we played a couple of letter games and a rhyming game. First I had made some cards with vocabulary words, that correlated with the book "The Mitten", on them and the students were to match the letters of the word with a letter tile from the game Bananagram. The first time we did this activity the letters on the picture cards were capital letters just like the game tiles, but this time the picture cards had the lower case letters and the student had to recognize the matching upper case letter.
Then we played a couple of rounds of Boggle Jr.. While one student was creating their word the other student and I sang "The Mitten Song." For our last activity, we took turns choosing an object in the room, saying its name, and the rest of us had to think of a word that made a rhyme, real or made up.
Home work is rather simple each student was given a book called "The Cozy Mitten" from kinderalphabet.com and a worksheet where they were to color only the triangles in the picture and discover the hidden picture.
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